Transcripts For CSPAN2 Book TV 20131214

The twoparty system and good for the country trade thank you so much. I appreciate it. Thank you, guys. [applause] [inaudible conversations] its a rare constant in american political life if you look at say congress in 1901, less than 2 of members came from workingclass backgrounds, got into politics and eventually round up in congress. Flash forward to the present day the average number of congress spent less than 2 of their career doing manual labor jobs or doing Service Industry jobs. So this is one thing that really hasnt changed. Lots of different aspects in the political process. Broad cass television, cable news the rise of candidate centered elections all of this is happening. One of the constants during the last 100 years or so is workingclass people are not getting elected to political office. Beat the other thing we can do to test whether roosevelt made a difference or not be the way history turned out is to use my counterfactual history test. Suppose a possible alternative had been present not Wendell Willkie who was the moderate republican internationalists who ran against roosevelt in 1940 but suppose the republicans had nominated Charles Lindbergh who was a great aviation hero who was very isolationist and quite sympathetic to hitlers germany. If you had a president lindbergh instead of a president roosevelt i think history would have turned out quite differently. I doubt that he would have made the preparations that roosevelt made. A and b i doubt that after japan attacked the United States that he would have oriented toward toward europe rather than keeping it focused just on a show. So in that sense Franklin Roosevelt made a big difference